Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(142)

“You’ve bent this entire war to your own ends,” I croaked. “You shaped this new ideology of draconic purity so they wouldn’t mind sacrificing themselves.”


“Oh, it’s not new.” The wind made her short brown hair stand up on her head. “It just needed refinement so they wouldn’t mind fighting to the death. After all, a pure dragon should not care about dying. Caring is an emotion; emotions are human and corrupt. A dragon who cares is not a dragon.”

“You don’t care,” I said. “I’ve felt so much guilt for having abandoned you to them. So much pity and remorse. But you just want dragons to die.”

“Not just dragons,” she said, her eyes diamond-sharp. “Humans are no better. My mother left me the memory of my human father and my violent conception. She wanted me to understand human nature. She was a bell-exempt student, walking home at night; he was a rapist. I had nightmares about it when I was small, but now I’ve visited the alley where it happened. I understand what a fool she was. She should have killed him then and there, the treaty be damned. He was a monster; she was not monster enough.”

“I’m so sorry,” I half whispered, as if my pity could make any difference now.

Jannoula scoffed. “We are Saints, Seraphina. It is our right to decide who dies, our privilege to move pieces across the chessboard of history.” She gestured as if she were crashing two stones together, or two skulls. “We may break this world as we see fit.”

Her face had become a mask. “This is my war. All sides will destroy each other, and those who survive will be ours. We shall rule them with justice and mercy, and we shall finally be free. I have ordained it.”

The first wave of Loyalists had reached us; they screamed by overhead. Jannoula smirked and reached over Ingar’s twitching body for Dame Okra’s hand. Jannoula threw back her head, and the force of her will rippled down the chain. I could not see the light they made, but I didn’t have to.

Dragons began falling out of the sky.





I’d been adamantly opposed to killing Jannoula; that seemed naive now. In a surge of desperation, I rushed her, trying to catch her off balance and disrupt the trap somehow.

Without even opening her eyes, she blocked me with the collective mind-fire and slammed me back against the parapet like some irritating insect.

Gianni Patto, grinning toothily, broke the line and approached me with his big hands extended. I’d hit my head; I couldn’t dodge. He tossed me over his shoulder, which stabbed me painfully in the stomach. For a moment, the world seemed to stand still while I saw everything: the blue slate rooftops of Castle Orison, armies crawling across the plain, dragons drifting in the air around us like autumn leaves on a pond. Jannoula laughing.

Then Gianni hauled me down the tower, skittered across the flagstone courtyard on his big chicken feet, and lumbered into the palace. He hit my head on a door frame coming in, and then on another at my final destination, some disused suite on the third floor facing south. He dumped me unceremoniously on the bare wooden floor and banged the door shut behind me.

I scrambled to my feet and tested the door. It wasn’t locked. I opened it a crack, only to see Gianni Patto sitting on the floor outside. He turned his big ugly pumpkin head to grin at me, and I slammed the door in his face.

I took stock of where I was. There was a broad bed with no linens, tall windows with no drapes, empty shelves, an empty cedar chest, an empty fireplace. The suite had only two rooms, the smaller of which, a dressing room, had south-and west-facing windows.

There were no sheets or drapes I could use to climb out a window, and no hidden doors, but I could watch the war from here. Jannoula had thought of everything.

The battle was unfolding before my eyes. The Loyalists flew past the city, doubled back sharply, and clashed with the Old Ard in the overcast sky. The Old Ard had been so close on the Loyalists’ tails that I hadn’t distinguished the two waves until the Loyalists turned. Dragons grappled and flamed above the city. St. Abaster’s Trap brought down dozens from both sides.

Dropping our allies was no accident. Jannoula knew what she was doing.

On the plain, Samsam hit Goredd’s flank; Josef had apparently decided to punish us. The knights left the Samsamese to the Ninysh and Goreddi foot soldiers; their job was to engage the dragons. During the Age of Saints, they’d had ways to fight dragons in the sky—missiles and wings—but these arts had been lost to the ages, or had died with the banishment of our knights. Nine months had not been long enough to revive them. The dragons of the Old Ard stayed high and focused intently on the Loyalists, out of range of our dracomachists for now.

What was happening to Comonot in the north? Had he already struck at the Kerama, only to find it held more strongly than anticipated? I dreaded to think what the result would be if he was defeated.

Jannoula had played all sides against one another. I should have killed her weeks ago. I’d had abundant time and opportunity.

I’d been so certain I could find another way.

If only I could have unbound my own mind-fire, surely I could have made a difference. I flopped onto the bare bed, meditated until I found the garden gate, said the ritual words, and entered. My garden, once so full of life and promise, looked like nothing more than a weed-strewn lawn around the Wee Cottage, with a swamp at one edge of it. There was a rail fence around the whole thing—that was absurd. I might have kicked a rail fence over in the real world, but this one had me bound up tightly. I circled the perimeter—a five-minute walk, if that—and even came up with a silly ritual chant: Unbind, unbind, dissolve, dissolve. Nothing happened.